H of H Playbook is an explosion of thought, in drawings and language, about a Greek tragedy called Herakles by the 5th-century BC poet Euripides. In myth Herakles is an embodiment of manly violence who returns home after years of making war on enemies and monsters (his famous "Labors of Herakles") to find he cannot adapt himself to a life of peacetime domesticity. He goes berserk and murders his whole family. Suicide is his next idea. Amazingly, this does not happen. Due to the intervention of his friend Theseus, Herakles comes to believe he is not, after all, indelibly stained by his own crimes, nor is his life without value. It remains for the reader to judge this redemptive outcome. (From New Directions)

H of H Playbook is a finalist for the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. The winner will be announced on Nov. 16, 2022.

Anne Carson has won numerous awards and accolades, including a Guggenheim, a Lannan Foundation fellowship and a MacArthur "genius grant." With her 2001 book, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, she became the first woman to receive England's T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Carson also won Canada's inaugural Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 for her collection Men in the Off Hours. Her work combines classical mythology with startling reflections on loss, monstrosity and loneliness — reinventing ancient wounds for a modern age. Her poetry collections include Autobiography of Red, Antigonick and Red Doc>.